THE MENDACIOUS MISTER REYNOLDS

Anyone out there concerned about the amount of influence Glenn "Heh" Reynolds holds over what people read out on the internets should be more worried about the links that folks don't click on but instead assume, understandably, to say something roughly approximating what Professor Reynolds says they do. Take the new website Save the ACLU, organized by influential members and former members who've had a series of increasingly nasty and public disputes with the current leadership over how well the organization is living up to its own values. The major flashpoints have been the extent of compliance expected of board members with the leadership's public relations approach, and the extent of compliance demonstrated by the leadership with conditions imposed by public and private organizations offering funding. As the website describes,

Over the past three years, these breaches of principle include the ACLU’s approval of grant agreements that restrict speech and associational rights; efforts by management to impose gag rules on staff and to subject staff to email surveillance; a proposal to bar ACLU board members from publicly criticizing the ACLU; and informal campaigns to purge the ACLU of its internal critics.

You'd have a hard time guessing that those were the sorts of grievances in play if you just read the link on Instapundit, which reads:

A SAVE THE ACLU CAMPAIGN from supporters who feel the organization has become excessively politicized.

Now the generous read here I suppose would be that "politicized" refers to "office politics" - that the ACLU is being accused of being too political in the sense of being too concerned with reputations and status and salaries and the like. But that's hardly the intuitive read of that sentence. If you didn't know better, you'd think that even the ACLU's supporters have come to echo the contention of Reynolds and others that when the ACLU was backing free speech three decades ago it was being heroic, but when it backs privacy rights today it's being "political" out of hatred for Bush. The gripe of the critics, arguably, is that the ACLU isn't being political enough - that is, that the politics of its mission haven't sufficiently infused its methods of implementation.